THE distributors of this film insisted I had to attend a public preview audience at the expense of spending an evening at home with my children.

So I did. And I can exclusively reveal the woman sitting next but two to me couldn’t have had a nosier bag of sweets if she’d plugged them into a Marshall amp.

Meanwhile, one of the two people behind me kept dropping his shoes while repeatedly putting then on and taking them off again.

They also got up and returned at least three times between them.

Since I was more scared wondering who was sitting behind me, this back row activity was actually the best effect of the night after an early scene uses a lazy camera trick to suggest there is something sinister behind the bereaved central female character, Annie.

For the first ten minutes everything on screen was deathly quiet.

Which only served to emphasise the rustling noises that 50 people stuffing their faces around you can make.

Eventually, everyone settled down, but the film didn’t get any better.

It still felt like Paranormal Inactivity crossed with watered down versions of everything from Right At Your Door to The Lovely Bones, Silence of the Lambs and Girl, Interrupted.

At times it’s well filmed, beautifully lit and cleverly staged – but the script, penned by director Nicholas McCarthy is as unremittingly awful as the unoriginal, unimaginative title is seemingly meaningless.

The story details how Annie has just lost her mother.

And, while she is trying to understand her past, something strange is happening in the house where she grew up.

Looking rather like a younger Julianne Moore, telly star Caity Lotz (Mad Men / Death Valley) is a not unattractive sight.

She wears a top that’s as ludicrously short from behind as it is low at the front and straddles her motorbike more convincingly than Transformers’ Megan Fox. No complaints there, then.

But Elizabeth Olsen delivered far more chills in Silent House recently.